Journalist Helen Andrews is not going to be popular with lots of readers of her book Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. But as a U.S.-raised “boomer” myself and a former practicing journalist, I must agree with her general thesis, if not with all of her examples.
First of all, U.S. boomers have been perhaps-accurately described as extraordinarily self absorbed. Worst, they arguably have been destructive of culture.
“The boomers destroyed the fabric of society,” says Charles Haywood, a Gen X commentator:
They demanded rights, and rejected responsibilities
They destroyed families
They destroyed education, substituting cant and leftist ideology for rigor and the transmission of American ideals
They crushed the working class, both through their extractive economics, such as globalization, and by smashing all intermediary institutions, while they exalted the federal government and the priesthood of the administrative state, thereby neutering the working class as a political force and mutating beyond recognition the political structure of the Republic
They destroyed high culture in everything from architecture to music to film.
“The essence of boomerness, which sometimes manifests itself as hypocrisy and other times just as irony…(is that) they tried to liberate us, and instead of freedom they left behind chaos,” she writes. “They inherited prosperity, social cohesion, and functioning institutions. They passed on debt, inequality, moribund churches, and a broken democracy.”
Strong words, indeed. Some might just say she is “mean,” rather than “telling the truth in love.” I mostly want to know whether what she sees approximates truth.
“We experimented with our own lives and those of others; we turned out to be mistaken,” says commentator Lloyd Robertson. Indeed, one author calls boomers “sociopathic,” indeed “deceitful, selfish, imprudent, remorseless and hostile.”
“Only a few decades ago, it might have seemed progressives wanted to replace dogmatism of any kind with a new openness: a true welcoming of different points of view, a marketplace of ideas comparable to the agora in ancient Athens,” he says. “Instead, of course, we are experiencing the tightening and enforcement of new dogmas.”
Of course, it might also be fair to note that intergeneration conflict is perhaps nothing new, and that not every boomer is well off, smug and arrogant.
Mere epithets, in other words, are not helpful. On the other hand, the charge that boomers are robbing our children of their future, looking at our refusal to fix social security or other entitlements, has policy relevance.
My own criticism is not so much in that area, but in the disingenuous sense of moral superiority so many boomers seem to embrace.
And boomers are not alone. Other generations seemingly have had the same obnoxious self assurance and narrowmindedness (if remaining generally completely unaware of those traits).
And they seem to have passed on some of those traits to subsequent generations, although some of us have hope that millennials can “break free” from the influence of the 1960s and stop believing that “narcissism is the highest form of patriotism.”
The broad story is one of individualism substituted for collective good; “me” instead of “we;” “I” instead of “us;” the immediate in place of the enduring. It isn’t pretty, or praiseworthy.
